Emma Cervone’s Long Live Atahualpa contributes to the scholarly trend of examining Ecuadorian indigenous political activism from the perspective of grassroots organizations rather than only via national indigenous leaders. Also important is Cervone’s focus on activism in the central highland civil parish of Tixán, Chimborazo, rather than on the better-known cases in the northern highlands of Ecuador. Cervone asserts that examining national events from a local perspective “works at the frontier of culture, identity, and power to explore the meanings generated in the everyday by the people who resist domination” (p. 19).
The focus on Tixán and Cervone’s many years in residence there provide a richly detailed discussion of indigenous versus nonindigenous perceptions of the rise of the Inca Atahualpa organization in the region. She shows, for example, how the context of national indigenous uprisings emboldened local indigenous peoples to act on their grievances (particularly over land) and how the...
